This volume investigates environmental and political crises that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, and considers their effects on people’s lives. At this time, the fragile human existence was imagined as a ‘Dance of Death’, where anyone, regardless of social status or age, could perish unexpectedly. This book covers events ranging from cooling temperatures and the onset of the Little Ice Age, to the frequent occurrence of epidemic disease, pest infestations, food shortages and famines. Covering the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, this collection of essays considers a range of countries between Iceland (to the north), Italy (to the south), France (to the west) and the westernmost parts of Russia (to the east). This wide-reaching volume considers how deeply climate variability and changes affected and changed society in the late medieval to early modern period, and asks what factors, other than climate, interfered in the development of environmental stress and socio-economic crises. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental and Climate History, Environmental Humanities, Medieval and Early Modern History and Historical Geography, as well as Climate Change and Environmental Sciences.

Elina Gertsman's multifaceted study introduces readers to the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death, an extraordinary subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Conceived from the start as an inherently public image, simultaneously intensely personal and widely accessible, the medieval Dance of Death proclaimed the inevitability of death and declared the futility of human ambition. Gertsman inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. Pulling together a wide variety of sources and drawing attention to those images that have slipped through the cracks of the art historical canon, Gertsman examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.

The roots and evolution of two concepts usually thought to be Western in origin-musica mundana (the music of the spheres) and musica humana (music's relation to the human soul)-are explored. Beginning with a study of the early creeds of the Near East, Professor Meyer-Baer then traces their development in the works of Plato and the Gnostics, and in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Previous studies of symbolism in music have tended to focus on a single aspect of the problem. In this book the concepts of musica humana and musica mundane are related to philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of religion and are given a rightful place in the history of civilization. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This groundbreaking collection of essays by a host of international authorities addresses the many aspects of the Danse Macabre, a subject that has been too often overlooked in Anglo-American scholarship. The Danse was once a major motif that occurred in many different media and spread across Europe in the course of the fifteenth century, from France to England, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Spain, Italy and Istria. Yet the Danse is hard to define because it mixes metaphors, such as dance, di ...

The 'Danse Macabre' of Women is a 15th-century French poem found in an illuminated late-medieval manuscript. This book contains reproductions of each manuscript folio, a translation and explanatory chapters by Ann Tukey Harrison. Art historian Sandra L. Hindman also contributes a chapter.

This book combines a scholarly edition of Lydgate’s Dance of Death and the French Danse Macabre poem, and discusses their wider context and historical circumstances of their creation, authorship and visualisation.

This volume joins new editions of both texts of John Lydgate's The Dance of Death, related Middle English verse, and a new translation of Lydgate's French source, the Danse macabre. Together these poems showcase the power of the danse macabre motif, offering a window into life and death in late medieval Europe. In vivid, often grotesque, and darkly humorous terms, these poems ponder life's fundamental paradox: while we know that we all must die, we cannot imagine our own death.